I don’t know if heaven or hell exists, but if both do, then it seems like you have a 50% chance of a bad outcome. So, lately, I have been asking people, if they could be cryogenically preserved, would they do it? Like in that cartoon, Futurama. You know, where when you die, they freeze you at a super low temperature, and then way in the future when medical technology has sufficiently advanced, they can thaw you out, fix whatever it was that killed you, and poof, you’re all good.

It’s funny how everyone said no. That surprised me. I don’t know if it’s because they believe in the afterlife and deluded themselves into believing that they are going to heaven. Then I ask, but what if there is no afterlife? No heaven or hell but some super boring existence, like watching endless reruns of 80s sitcoms? Oh, wait, that would be hell.

My point is, it’s not a sure thing. You don’t know if you’ll go to heaven, hell, or some other weird place. So, why not roll the dice and turn yourself into a popsicle? Sure, that might not work, but heck, what do you have to lose, right?

Apparently, that option appeals to very few people. This is borne out by the fact that only about 1,000 people have chosen this procedure. Even though it only costs about $150,000 to have it done. I say only because last year about 3 million people died, and of those, according to Kiplinger, 10% of them had over a million dollars when they passed. So, that means 300,000 people per year easily have the requisite resources to have themselves cryopreserved, yet according to official records, only about 1,000 people have done so since the inception of cryopreservation in 1967. That means less than 0.6% of the people who have died since then have elected to do so.

To me, that seemed improbable. Until I started informally polling people. So far, I have asked over 100 friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers, and no one has said they wanted that.

You might be wondering what’s my fascination with this issue other than the fact that if there is hell, I might end up there. Well, way back in the 80s, my uncle Bernie, who was really rich, used his money to buy gold. He buried the gold on the family farm but told no one where. Then he had himself cryopreserved. His master plan was that when they thawed him out, he would dig up his gold. I guess he assumed that in the future, gold will still be valuable. Who knows, he might be right based on the latest valuation of gold. It was $200 per ounce when I was in high school, and now it’s over $5,000 per ounce.

My dad said, knowing his brother Bernie, it was all a scam to get out of paying inheritance tax and he hatched this whole story how no one knows where the gold is and his son, my cousin Frank has all the gold. If so, Frank is being very disciplined and not blowing it all on Lamborghinis and strippers.

But Uncle Bernie needs to hope that gold will still be worth something because recently CERN used the Large Hadron Collider to change lead into gold. Of course, the electricity needed costs 1000 times more than the gold was worth. But who knows, far in the future, energy might be cheap because of nuclear fusion. There’s a bunch of companies working on fusion because the energy demand for AI is so high, and suddenly they are getting a ton of R&D money. One of them announced that AI is helping them develop fusion, and they will have practical fusion reactors available in 2028. But I digress.

Bernie’s plan is not terrible if you stop and think about it. Maybe some people have their fingers crossed they are going to heaven, which may or may not exist. But it’s hard to argue that the hoping-on-hope plan is any better than Uncle Bernie’s plan. And who knows, maybe he went to heaven anyhow because being unfrozen will never work. I even asked my pastor at church what happens to your soul if you are cryopreserved. She looked at me like I was crazy and said no one had ever asked her that before.

There are not that many options. You can hope heaven exists and you will go there. You can go all in on health stuff, working out, eating right, and all that and hope that whole cloning and brain transplant thing gets invented before you croak. Or the singularity thing where your consciousness can be uploaded to the cloud or into a robot. Or you can have yourself frozen for later. Is any one of those any better than the other?

Yet, why do so many people choose not to be frozen? It’s weird when you stop to think about it. But then, after researching it, I discovered that the records on it are not necessarily correct. A lot of people choose to keep it a secret. There are a bunch of ways to get it done secretly for about $100,000 more. I wish we knew how many people have decided to do it in secret. It makes me wonder why someone would care. Why would you want it to be a secret?

But there must be a reason because I simply cannot believe less than 0.06% of the population would want to be cryogenically preserved. That seems too low.

Then I found out why. I talked to my financial advisor about it, and he said that a lot of people are opting for cryogenic preservation, and because of that, they have developed a special type of trust fund that continues after you have passed and been preserved. The reason a lot of people keep it quiet is for reasons related to probate. They do not want their relatives to sue over it. So, they tell everyone they gave everything away to charity.

The Bible says the root of all evil is the love of money. They better hope thawing out works. Otherwise, they are definitely going to hell.

But then I thought of another reason to be concerned about the human popsicle option. Who knows what you might wake up to. What if it turns out that everyone is part of a weird Trump-worshiping cult? That would be hell for sure. Or what if aliens from outer space take over our planet and they are weird-looking monsters who eat humans, and they are all drooling at the sight of my nubile human flesh, and they only thawed me out because they already ate all the other humans on Earth? Or what if AI robots have taken over the planet and all humans are giant fat blobs that lay around watching AI-generated movies, and the robots feed them so they can harvest their fat to make oil to lubricate their gears. That’s a way more likely scenario than that stupid plot in the movie, The Matrix, where humans provided energy for robots. Duh, AI is inventing fusion, so why would they need humans for energy?

OK, maybe cryogenic preservation has risks too.

Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, or the weird futures.

Meh, I guess I’ll roll some dice to decide.